I'm excited to serve as the first director of the Ren Foundation. Since the Roman empire, all currencies have suffered from a technology problem: unbacked and centralized ledgers. We have paid a price for this problem in the form of currency debasement. Governments spend more than they earn, fund the deficit by borrowing, accrue interest on the debt, and eventually have to print money to repay the interest and avoid defaulting. Eventually, a debt trap becomes a debt spiral, which I fear may be looming in the US. For the first time, we have a technology solution to unbacked and centralized ledgers: a decentralized ledger backed by energy. The ledger enables a non-liability money like gold, but with a hardcoded supply that's entirely unaffected by demand. It's also portable and can be sent over the internet. This money is called bitcoin, and it's the first of its kind. If the best monies are those most capable of being sold[1], however, then bitcoin needs to be more salable — without the need to trust a third party — to accelerate its mass adoption. This can be achieved through decentralized financial markets and an interoperability protocol that enables bitcoin to be used in those markets. At the Ren Foundation, we're focused on the research and development of trustless interoperability to help accelerate the adoption of better money. Ren v1 produced over $13 billion in volume on mainnet and motivates our upcoming v2. We're a team of blockchain researchers and developers eager to work with the top minds in the space, and are actively funding contributors. Reach out if our mission resonates with you. [1] @LynAldenContact, lynalden.com/what-is-money/

If app chains could 2FA their own funds with a decentralized custodian, they could bootstrap and scale security independent of their own usage. An RFC I wrote in the @renprotocol community on the subject: forum.renproject.io/t/rfc-00….